Month: May 2022

Summer of Code: But wait, we have another participant!

This year’s Google Summer of Code participant selection process created a situation that we’ve never encountered before: Two participants put in excellent proposals for the same project and both participants did a very good job of engaging with the community. But there was one difference between the two — one participant had engaged with us months earlier, written a whole new feature, saw it through the release process and got the feature into production.

This compelled us to accept the participant with whom we had already built a rapport. But collectively we felt really really bad about the fact that the other participant, Chinmay Kunkikar, would be rejected from Summer of Code and not work with us.

Fortunately we had recently earned 15,000GBP from our participation in the ODI Peer Learning Network 2, which we decided to spent on contributions to Open Source and musicians that our team loves. When the suggestion came up that we could create an internship on the spot that more or less follows the concept of Summer of Code, and that we could take on Chinmay and knock out yet another project during the summer, we jumped on the idea.

And with that I am pleased to announce that Chinmay will take on the “Upcoming and new releases page” project for ListenBrainz. This project will show a timeline of upcoming music releases and releases that have been recently released, complete with the ability to play these releases in the page.

Our team feels strongly about Chinmay as well as this new feature, so we’re excited that we’re taking on this 8th participant for this summer.

Welcome Chinmay!

Welcoming GSoC 2022 students!

Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal to MetaBrainz for this year’s Summer of Code!

This year, we have selected seven projects. The chosen students and projects are:

Ansh Goyal – BookBrainz and CritiqueBrainz: CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities

Ashutosh Aswal – MusicBrainz Android App: Adding BrainzPlayer in Android App

Prathamesh Ghatole – ListenBrainz: Clean Up The Music Listening Histories Dataset

Shatabarto – ListenBrainz: Send a track to another user as a personal recommendation

Shubh – BookBrainz: Unified Creation Form

skelly37 – Picard: Make Picard work in single instance mode, then improve existing error handling and crash info.

Yuzie – ListenBrainz: Add Timezone support to ListenBrainz

Welcome aboard and congratulations!
Your contributions to MetaBrainz projects and the community are impressive and admirable. We look forward to work with you over the summer and see your work come to fruition 🙂

Communication is the key to success in a closely knit community as ours. Always feel free to reach out to your mentors and other members of the community if you face any issues (stuck in your code, health or family emergencies, etc.). We, the mentors, are here to support and help you.

For all the students that applied but did not get accepted: we appreciate your applications, and even if you did not make the cut this year, we hope that you will stick around and apply with us again next year when we know you better – and you know us better.

akshaaatt, alastair, lucifer, mayhem, monkey, outsidecontext, zas

Picard 2.8 released

The Picard team is happy to announce that the final version 2.8 of MusicBrainz Picard is now available for download. MusicBrainz Picard is the official tag editor for the MusicBrainz database and helps you get your music collection sorted and cleaned up with the latest data from MusicBrainz.

This release brings many changes, including long requested features like Windows long path support and advanced relationships for huge box sets. See below for the highlights.

Continue reading “Picard 2.8 released”

MusicBrainz schema change release, 2022-05-16 (with upgrade instructions)

We’re happy to announce the release of our May 2022 schema change today! Thanks to all who were patient during today’s downtime as we released everything to our production servers, and thanks to ikerm2003, mfmeulenbelt rinmon and salo.rock for updating the translations.

This is once again a fairly minor release as far as schema changes go, but please do report any issues that you come across, especially related to the propagation of ratings and tags.

New, user-facing changes with this release include withdrawn-only release groups showing in the official overview again (MBS-12208) and the final disappearance of Amazon cover art (MBS-12200). To this regard, the report of releases that have Amazon cover art but no Cover Art Archive front cover will stay available for editors to check their subscribed entities.

Additionally, several small changes will allow, in the next couple of releases, to store more information about genres (including URL relationships) and to recognize and special-case mood tags (MBS-12190). Another new feature that will start to be used in the API and artist credit pages is the addition of MusicBrainz IDs for artist credits, which allow referring to them with a unique and more persistent ID (MBS-11456). Finally, a few more under-the-hood only changes are made, which should ensure better performance for finding artists, events, etc. for all areas contained in a given one, and less bugs when adding and changing tags and ratings.

The area containment changes make use of a new materialized table. Like the ones we added last year, this table isn’t dumped nor replicated, since it is derived entirely from primary table data. Rather, it will be created during migration (or, in a new install, by running the admin/BuildMaterializedTables script) and triggers will be added to keep it up-to-date once it has been built. These triggers are created on replicated servers, too.

The accompanying new version of the search index rebuilder brings performance improvements for both the main server and mirrors, and simplifies maintenance. See the release notes for details.

A new release of MusicBrainz Docker is also available that matches this update of MusicBrainz Server. See the release notes for update instructions.

Now, on to the instructions.

Schema Change Upgrade Instructions

Note: Importing the latest data dump is always a valid alternative to running ./upgrade.sh on an existing database, if you’d prefer to also get new data in one go. Just follow the relevant instructions in INSTALL.md. The git tag is v-2022-05-16.1-schema-change. The rest of the instructions here assume an in-place upgrade.

  1. Make sure DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE is set to 26 in lib/DBDefs.pm.
  2. If you’re using the live data feed (your REPLICATION_TYPE is set to RT_SLAVE), ensure you’ve replicated up to the most recent replication packet available with the old schema. If you’re not sure, run ./admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges and see what it tells you; if you’re ready to upgrade, it should say “This replication packet matches schema sequence #27, but the database is currently at #26.”
  3. Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.
  4. Turn off cron jobs if you’re automatically updating the database via cron jobs.
  5. If you’re using the live search indexing, stop it and, assuming sir is under the same directory as musicbrainz-server, run cd ../sir && python2.7 -m sir triggers && cd - && ./admin/psql < ../sir/sql/DropTriggers.sql && ./admin/psql < ../sir/sql/DropFunctions.sql
  6. Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-2022-05-16.1-schema-change.
  7. Run cpanm --installdeps --notest . (note the dot at the end) to ensure your perl-based dependencies are up to date.
  8. Run ./upgrade.sh (it may take a while to vacuum at the end).
  9. Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 27 in lib/DBDefs.pm as instructed by the output of ./upgrade.sh.
  10. If your REPLICATION_TYPE is set to RT_SLAVE, change it to RT_MIRROR. (The previous terminology will work for the time being, but is now deprecated.)
  11. If you’re using the live search indexing, assuming again that sir is under the same directory as musicbrainz-server, run cd ../sir && git fetch origin && git checkout v3.0.1 && python2.7 -m sir triggers && cd - && ./admin/psql < ../sir/sql/CreateFunctions.sql && ./admin/psql < ../sir/sql/CreateTriggers.sql and rebuild indexes which takes hours (by running cd ../sir && python2.7 -m sir reindex && cd -) then start it in watch mode (with cd ../sir && git fetch origin && git checkout v3.0.1 && python2.7 -m sir amqp_watch)
  12. Turn cron jobs back on, if applicable.
  13. Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if applicable. It’s also recommended you restart Redis. If you’re accessing your MusicBrainz server in a web browser, run ./script/compile_resources.sh.

Here’s the list of resolved tickets:

Fixed Bug

  • [MBS-5359] – *_tag tables are corrupt and need to be regenerated
  • [MBS-11760] – Removing the last use of a tag does not always remove the tag
  • [MBS-12369] – Standalone databases may be missing foreign keys for the documentation schema

New Feature

  • [MBS-12190] – Add Mood support in the database

Improvement

  • [MBS-11456] – Add MBIDs to artist credits in the database with merge
  • [MBS-12141] – Block tag names that are empty or have uncontrolled whitespace with database constraints
  • [MBS-12224] – Keep tags’ ref_count and aggregate vote counts updated with triggers
  • [MBS-12249] – Add a materialized area_containment table kept up-to-date with triggers
  • [MBS-12256] – Keep rating and rating_count column on *_meta tables up-to-date with triggers
  • [MBS-12313] – Clarify item naming in the Search drop down menu

Database Schema Change Task

  • [MBS-11457] – Drop the series ordering_attribute column
  • [MBS-11755] – Remove unused tags
  • [MBS-12157] – Remove support for Amazon cover art
  • [MBS-12200] – Drop schema objects related to Amazon cover art support
  • [MBS-12225] – Rename “slave” to “mirror” (inclusive language update)
  • [MBS-12250] – Create dbmirror2 schema on production and mirror servers
  • [MBS-12252] – Add edit_genre table
  • [MBS-12253] – Add relationship tables for genres
  • [MBS-12254] – Add genre_annotation table
  • [MBS-12255] – Add genre_alias_type table and make genre_alias consistent

Picard 2.8 Release Candidate 2

We have decided to put out another release candidate Picard 2.8.0rc2 for the upcoming Picard 2.8. We got some valuable feedback and fixed some new bugs as well as some older ones that just got detected while testing the first release candidate. Thanks a lot to everyone who reported those issues.

This is a pre-release we put out for wider testing and to gather feedback on the changes before the final 2.8 release. Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums.

Continue reading “Picard 2.8 Release Candidate 2”

Picard 2.8 Release Candidate

The Picard team is happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate for the upcoming Picard 2.8. This is a pre-release we put out for wider testing and to gather feedback on the changes before the final 2.8 release.

Please report any issue through our bug tracker and give us feedback on this beta release on the Community Forums.

Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed to this release with code, translations, bug reports and general feedback. This release contains code contributions by Philipp Wolfer, Bob Swift, Laurent Monin, jesus2099, Adam James, cybersphinx and Aerozol.

Continue reading “Picard 2.8 Release Candidate”